Mega Man 5
'Notable RTAs' Rockman 5 in 33:24.3 by Baronhaynes (EMU) Rockman 5 in 33:24.6 by ohon (Famicom) Rockman 5 in 33:40 by becored (Famicom) Rockman 5 in 33:57 by almondcity (NES) 'Boss Damage Table' Notes: *For Mega Buster, the first number is when the weapon is fired normally; the second is when it is fully charged. *Credit goes to Twilight Man from MMKB for damage values. 'Boss Orders' The two routes used in the game are most commonly called beat and beatless, and the difference is whether you collect the letters in robot master stages to unlock Beat or not. The main differences in beatless are that you get to do crystal skip and save some time by skipping the letters in the rest of the stages, while not having beat in the capsule fight makes it reliant on the capsule spawning low and risks losing a lot of time if unlucky. The boss order is the same for both routes. 'Fastest Order' #Star Man (S. Arrow) #Gravity Man #Gyro Man #Crystal Man #Napalm Man #Stone Man #Charge Man #Wave Man 'Super Arrow' Faster than sliding. Super Arrow accelerates at 0.33 pixels per frame, reaching top speed of 4 pixels per frame. To compare, slide's speed is 2.5 pixels per frame. Note: The arrow will only consume weapon energy when it first appear on screen (2 energy normally, but 1 is enough to make it appear) and when Mega Man stands on one. That means you can save weapon energy by limiting the amount of time you stand on it. **'One way to do this is to "run" at the tip of the arrow, as it will clip you back on when you fall of. The arrow(s) will not disappear when the energy runs out. Certain memory values can affect your falling speed while on an arrow, and potentially cause you to fall off instead of getting clipped back when attempting to run at the tip. Watching the intro cutscene, or more precisely the scene where Proto Man grabs Dr. Wily, will cause this to happen to the second arrow you place on screen, and you should do a hard reset before starting a run if you've let the cutscene play up to that point. Another one that can happen in a run is having napalm bombs explode at a high falling speed, which you can fix by firing them again on the ground. More details here. 'Advanced Techniques Gravity skip After killing Star Man in his stage, sometimes the jump in the weapon collect sequence happens with normal gravity and sometimes with zero gravity, the latter being a significant time loss. This is because the way the low gravity in the stage works is that every two out of three frames there's zero gravity and every third frame normal gravity, and once you lose control of Mega Man the game gets stuck in one of the two modes. Thanks to how the gravity mechanics interact with jumps and jumps delaying the end of the stage, doing a one-frame tap on the jump button right as the fanfare is about to start playing manipulates normal gravity for you. If the tap is longer but still four frames or less, normal gravity isn't guaranteed, but you'll have better odds than the one out of three you'd otherwise get. Crystal skip Crystal skip is a technique that abuses a kind of a memory overflow to warp you from the first room of the Crystal Man stage to the boss corridor. As skipping past the rest of the stage means you can't collect the Beat letter, this can only be used as a part of the beatless route, and is the single largest time save in it. Practical instructions Kill yourself by running into the second to last enemy in the first room of the Crystal Man stage right as the last enemy is spawning. If you did this correctly, right after you die only the bottom part of that last enemy will be walking back and forth. If the enemy isn't there at all, you died too early, before it spawned at all (too far left). If both the walker and the ball are there, you died too late, after the enemy spawned normally (too far right). There are three main strategies for setting this up, from the slowest and most consistent to the fastest and hardest (video reference and time comparison): The arrow setup On the platform before the enemy you'll suicide into, place a super arrow into either direction, a second one to the left while standing on the first one, and a third one to the right while standing on the second one, so that the last one accelerates to its full speed before hitting the enemy. The slide setup Slide into the enemy. If you're as far to the left on the platform as possible, the correct slide timing is as the enemy is turning around. The further right you are, the later you need to slide. The object index manipulation In the very beginning before going for the slide setup, also kill the walker part of the first enemy in the room, have the ball part start bouncing to the right, and have it on the screen before the enemy you're suiciding into spawns. If you did this correctly, you will respawn 256 frames (~4.27 seconds) faster. Technical details The game reserves a certain segment of RAM for the properties of each game object. For example, the X positions of all objects are in $0330-$0347, the room numbers in $0348-$035F, etc. Each byte corresponds to a specific object, with the first 8 reserved for Mega Man, the stage boss, and their projectiles, and the other 16 as general purpose. When the game wants to create a new enemy or whatever, it goes through the object indices starting from 8 until it finds a currently unused one. If all are full, the new object simply isn't created... except that for six specific objects, that check is missing. The rest of them are related to castle stage bosses and of no interest to us, but with the ball part of the enemies seen in the first room of Crystal, this can be abused. So what you want to do is fill up all the object slots between the walker part of one of these enemies spawning and its ball part spawning, or fill all but one before either spawns. The two convenient methods for this are napalm bombs and death explosion bubbles. Using napalm, you need to have done the Napalm Man stage first, and manage to kill yourself *after* triggering the glitch and warping somewhere offscreen. So far nobody has found a way to make this practical, and instead the suicide method is used. As the ball spawns, it will increment its object index until it has gone through all the available ones, and then, as it's missing the check where the routine would normally abort when all indices are used, it will continue creating the enemy with an index one above the valid range. Thus it's X position, which would normally be in the $0330-$0347 range as mentioned above, gets written to $0348, the address for the first value in the room numbers range which denotes the room Mega Man is currently in. This is the key part of the glitch - Mega Man's current room number getting corrupted to 140 or whatever means he's past the last respawn point and will respawn in the boss corridor instead of the beginning of the stage. Most of the other affected values simply don't matter, but as an unwanted side effect, the respawn timer located in $0468 (low) and $0480 (high) gets corrupted and hugely increases your respawn time. Normally as you die these get set to $2C and $01, meaning you respawn in 300 frames, but in our case, $0480 gets overwritten with the object index of the walker part of the enemy that we're abusing. Going through the room straightforwardly, this will be $A0, translating to a wait time of ~43 seconds instead of the normal 5. The object manipulation strat described above arranges it to end up in $09 instead. You could easily make it $08 too, but so far nobody has managed to execute the glitch like that or figure out why that is. Instead you'll find that changing the timing of sliding into the enemy by one frame will jump directly from the enemy not having spawned at all to both halves having appeared, with no frames on which the glitch happens in between. Refights skip Super Arrow can be used to push you inside a wall while sliding. TAS uses this in several places during stages, but saving time with those in RTA isn't really feasible. The one place it does get used in is skipping from the refights room into the Wily Press room, which happens to be stored effectively to the right of the refights room, after doing only one of the eight refights. Refights Skip (advanced) (Prisi Setup) * This is accomplished by placing the arrow at the correct height shown, standing against the wall on top of the arrow you slide left and press right very quickly to push through the wall. Refights Skip (easy) (Baddap Setup) * This is accomplished by placing an arrow at the correct height shown, and then dropping down a few pixels and firing a 2nd arrow. Then standing against the wall on the top arrow you slide left and have a lot longer time to press right to push through the wall. Version Differences The cutscene after you have defeated Dark Man, is about 18.3 seconds shorter in the Japanese version of the game, compared to the US version. Category:Classic Series